The Art of the Start 2.0: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything

Whether you're an entrepreneur, an intrapreneur, or a not-for-profit leader, there's no shortage of advice on such topics as writing a business plan, recruiting, raising capital, and branding. In fact there are so many books, articles, and websites that many startups get bogged down to the point of paralysis, or they focus on the wrong priorities and go broke before they discover their mistakes.

The Fire Starter Sessions: A Soulful + Practical Guide to Creating Success on Your Own Terms

As the creator of DanielleLaPorte.com - deemed "the best place online for kick-ass spirituality," Danielle LaPorte’s straight-talk life-and-livelihood sermons have inspired over one million people. Bold but empathetic, she reframes popular self-help and success concepts.

In Silicon Valley slang, a "bozo explosion" is what causes a lean, mean, fighting machine of a company to slide into mediocrity. As Guy Kawasaki puts it, "If the two most popular words in your company are partner and strategic, and partner has become a verb, and strategic is used to describe decisions and activities that don't make sense"...then it's time for a reality check.

The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything

What does it take to turn ideas into action? What are the elements of a perfect pitch? How do you win the war for talent? How do you establish a brand without bucks? These are some of the issues everyone faces when starting or revitalizing any undertaking, and Guy Kawasaki, former marketing maven of Apple Computer, provides the answers.

Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want

Many people feel called to help others and change the world, but they just don’t know how to fulfill their potential. They have the creativity and passion, but often get lost, not knowing how to direct their energies. Now, popular life coach Martha Beck shows how readers can find their calling in service and healing - while realizing their destiny. With a sparkling, compassionate, and often irreverent style, Beck draws from a combination of ancient wisdom and modern science to help readers consciously embrace vital skills that may be embedded in our DNA and are now made accessible again.

Contagious: Why Things Catch On

Why do some products get more word of mouth than others? Why does some online content go viral? Word of mouth makes products, ideas, and behaviors catch on. It's more influential than advertising and far more effective. Can you create word of mouth for your product or idea? According to Berger, you can. Whether you operate a neighborhood restaurant, a corporation with hundreds of employees, or are running for a local office for the first time, the steps that can help your product or idea become viral are the same.

A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

Claude Shannon was a tinkerer, a playful wunderkind, a groundbreaking polymath, and a digital pioneer whose insights made the Information Age possible. He constructed fire-breathing trumpets and customized unicycles, outfoxed Vegas casinos, and built juggling robots, but he also wrote the seminal text of the Digital Revolution. That work allowed scientists to measure and manipulate information as objectively as any physical object. His work gave mathematicians and engineers the tools to bring that world to pass.

Made to Stick

Mark Twain once observed, "A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on." His observation rings true: urban legends, conspiracy theories, and bogus public-health scares circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas (business people, teachers, politicians, journalists, and others) struggle to make their ideas "stick". In this indispensable guide, we discover that sticky messages of all kinds draw their power from the same six traits.

Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive

Whether you are in advertising, marketing, management, on sales, or just curious about how to be more influential in everyday life, Yes! shows how making small, scientifically proven changes to your approach can have a dramatic effect on your persuasive powers.

The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future

Still in his early 30s, Chris is on the verge of completing a tour of every country on earth – he’s already visited more than 175 nations - and yet he’s never held a “real job” or earned a regular paycheck. Rather, he has a special genius for turning ideas into income, and he uses what he earns both to support his life of adventure and to give back. In The $100 Startup, he tells you how to lead of life of adventure, meaning and purpose - and earn a good living.

Psyched Up: How the Science of Mental Preparation Can Help You Succeed

In Psyched Up, journalist Daniel McGinn dives into the latest psychological research and interviews athletes, soldiers, entertainers, and others who, despite years of practice and enviable track records, will ultimately be judged on their ability to deliver a solid performance when it's their turn to shine.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

Influence, the classic book on persuasion, explains the psychology of why people say yes - and how to apply these understandings. Dr. Robert Cialdini is the seminal expert in the rapidly expanding field of influence and persuasion. His 35 years of rigorous, evidence-based research, along with a three-year program of study on what moves people to change behavior, has resulted in this highly acclaimed book. You'll learn the six universal principles, how to use them to become a skilled persuader - and how to defend yourself against them.

To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth about Moving Others

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, one in nine Americans works in sales. Every day more than 15 million people earn their keep by persuading someone else to make a purchase. But dig deeper and a startling truth emerges: Yes, one in nine Americans works in sales. But so do the other eight. Whether we’re employees pitching colleagues on a new idea, entrepreneurs enticing funders to invest, or parents and teachers cajoling children to study, we spend our days trying to move others.

Ready to Be a Thought Leader?: How to Increase Your Influence, Impact, and Success

The how-to guide to becoming a go-to expert. Within their fields, thought leaders are sources of inspiration and innovation. They have the gift of harnessing their expertise and their networks to make their innovative thoughts real and replicable, sparking sustainable change and even creating movements around their ideas. In Ready to Be a Thought Leader?, renowned executive talent agent Denise Brosseau tells listeners how to develop and use that gift as she maps the path from successful executive, professional, or civic leader to respected thought leader.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won't create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them. It's easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1.

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World

With Give and Take, Adam Grant not only introduced a landmark new paradigm for success but also established himself as one of his generation's most compelling and provocative thought leaders. In Originals, he again addresses the challenge of improving the world but now from the perspective of becoming original: choosing to champion novel ideas and values that go against the grain, battle conformity, and buck outdated traditions. How can we originate new ideas, policies, and practices without risking it all?

Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

Why are some people and organizations more innovative, more influential, and more profitable than others? Why do some command greater loyalty from customers and employees alike? Even among the successful, why are so few able to repeat their successes over and over? People like Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs, and the Wright Brothers might have little in common, but they all started with why.

Pre-Suasion: Channeling Attention for Change

The author of the legendary best seller Influence, social psychologist Robert Cialdini, shines a light on effective persuasion and reveals that the secret doesn't lie in the message itself but in the key moment before that message is delivered.

Publisher's Summary

Enchantment, as defined by best-selling business guru Guy Kawasaki, is not about manipulating people. It transforms situations and relationships. It converts hostility into civility and civility into affinity. It changes the skeptics and cynics into the believers and the undecided into the loyal. Enchantment can happen during a retail transaction, a high-level corporate negotiation, or a Facebook update. And when done right, it's more powerful than traditional persuasion, influence, or marketing techniques.

Kawasaki argues that in business and personal interactions, your goal is not merely to get what you want but to bring about a voluntary, enduring, and delightful change in other people. By enlisting their own goals and desires, by being likable and trustworthy, and by framing a cause that others can embrace, you can change hearts, minds, and actions. For instance, enchantment is what enabled....

A Peace Corps volunteer to finesse a potentially violent confrontation with armed guerrillas

A small cable channel (E!) to win the TV broadcast rights to radio superstar Howard Stern

A seemingly crazy new running shoe (Vibram Five Fingers) to methodically build a passionate customer base

A Canadian crystal maker (Nova Scotian Crystal) to turn observers into buyers

This book explains all the tactics you need to prepare and launch an enchantment campaign; to get the most from both push and pull technologies; and to enchant your customers, your employees, and even your boss. It shows how enchantment can turn difficult decisions your way at times when intangibles mean more than hard facts. It will help you overcome other people's entrenched habits and defy the not-always- wise "wisdom of the crowd."

I ordered this book after reading articles and watching video clips about how great is was, but it turned out to be a random collection of general knowledge, peppered with drooling Apple product advocation and anti-(Adobe)Flash statements about how a web site home page should appear. I really was hoping that this would provide some insight into the psychology of customer motivation and product/service marketing, but it turned out to be (in my opinion) overstatement of the obvious.

Hey, the advertising worked on me, so there must be some magic in there somewhere!

I really admire Guy Kawasaki, but I could not offer up the fifth star for this book because too much of this book is recycled material. I've seen it or read much of it in other books. It's a worthwhile read if you are new to marketing or customer service. The term enchantment, may sound enchanting, but it's really just another way of talking about delivering positive experiences.

This book offers a very high-level overview of some of the psychology and research behind the elusive notion of being 'enchanting'. There is very little original content, as Kawasaki borrows from a vast array of other authors, including Malcolm Gladwell and Robert Cialdini. This book is a great jumping off point if you're looking for other sources that will drill down deeper into a particular subject. This book does a good job of explaining 'what to do' but without the critical 'how to do it' part. I found it to be dis-jointed as it jumped from subject to subject. Thrown in are a number of 'real life' stories, which were mildly interesting, but didn't appear to have much to do with the subject matter. As an avid reader of books in this category, reading Enchantment was like sitting down to dinner and being fed only cotton candy.

This is my first review on Amazon. And I did it because Guy asked me to. I was enchanted.

He mentioned in the book how he makes a strong effort to respond to emails, so I decided to give it a try. I shared my thoughts with him on the book and he actually responded to me. Now that's enchantment!

As I told Guy, I downloaded it from Audible. The lessons mixed with real life stories were inspiring and insightful. I also believe it helped me to focus and make great first impressions in some recent meetings.

Working in politics and government, I see real value in the book for candidates, campaign managers and anyone already in elected office. I also think it's great for anyone looking to change jobs or even start their own business. I definitely plan on listening to it again and taking a look at some of his previous books too.

Enchantment is certainly worth the listen. In fact true to form Guy spews out info at the rate of a fire hose and this is good and bad. Good because he makes sure you get value for your hard earned dollar and good because you will walk away with a number of action items you can actually act on right away. However, it is bad because you will never remember all of them. For this reason (and Guy will love this advice) you might want to also buy the actual book for reference.

Having said that I fully understand Dan's review "A Meal of Cotton Candy" (love his title). Almost everything Dan says in the review is correct. But I think Guy does a great job serving up the Cotton Candy. He puts a lot of info into one place and as I said, I at least walked away saying, "I need to do that." OK to be more accurate I should say, "I forgot Cialdini had written about that, I need to go do it". So, while this is certainly negative in one respect it does speak to Dan's point that the book is a good jumping off point for ideas for further reading. The one point in Dan's review that I disagree with is that Guy only addresses the 'what to do' but not the critical 'how to do it'. In some cases Guy does talk about the "how" and in others the "how" is obvious but it is often hard to remember to do it. For example, "do no evil" or I think Guy also borrows the idea of "don't do anything you wouldn't want to see published in your local paper". Well, I suppose Guy could have advised posting this mantra on your desk.

Finally, I have to say that I got a huge chuckle out of the book having recently finished "The Six Figure Second Income" (Jonathan Rozek , David Lindahl) because Guy must have just finished it as well. Although Guy has been at it for awhile so I wouldn't be surprised if he was the inspiration for Rozek and Lindahl. I won't go into the details but if you do listen to "The Six Figure Second Income" you will quickly get my point as well as a good chuckle.